'EA Replay' taps '90s nostalgia for PSP

Electronic Arts,the world's largest videogame producer, has announced the release of EA Replay, a compilation of its '90s-era titles reprogrammed for use on Sony's PlayStation Portable.

Even with the upcoming launches of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii consoles, the videogame industry can't ignore the marketing potential of nostalgia.

EA plans to jump onto the retro bandwagon on 15 November with EA Replay, a set of 14 of the company's titles that were originally released between 1990 and 1995. The games run the gamut from the action-strategy game Syndicate to the fantasy role-playing Ultima VII, which has since morphed into the massive multiplayer online game Ultima Online.

While EA Replay will be available only for the PSP handheld, the games featured in the compilation were originally released for a variety of platforms. Some, such as Wing Commander, were originally PC games (although later ported to consoles). Others, such as the Road Rash series and Desert Strike and Jungle Strike, were made for consoles like the Super Nintendo or the Sega Mega Drive.

The appeal of old-school videogames is nothing new. Arcade games originally launched in the 1980s were a big hit at this year's E3 trade show, while MySpace used a Flash version of Pac-Man to appease its fans when the social-networking service suffered an outage this summer.

But with EA Replay, Electronic Arts is mining the nostalgic value of games introduced well after the Pong era -- titles from the early to mid-1990s -- and marketing them as 'classics'.

EA Replay is set to sell for $19.99 (£11) in the US -- a UK price was not available.